A messy mixture of everything I love

Reflections

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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You sit in front of your desk and you have the brilliant idea of reading your old posts.
You scroll down until the beginning, that day you decided you wanted to communicate your thoughts to the world, to who wanted to listen.

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Hello, Internet,
as I mentioned some posts ago, I’m supposed to move to London at the beginning of July. On the last weeks I’ve joined Facebook groups, read a lot of blog posts about what to do, how to find a job, do the NIN, etc, to basically organise myself, write a nice and detailed list of everything I need, like the control freak I am, and be ready to everything I have to deal with once arrived.

Therefore, I should be prepared, I should be excited, but I’m realizing that I’m not – well, not as I was before – and I don’t know if it’s fear of failure or disappointment or just a feeling, silently screaming in the back of my mind, that I shouldn’t move. I should already have bought the airplane ticket, but every time I visit Ryanair’s website, the price is higher, but I don’t have the courage to buy it. Continue reading “London or Not London? About Fear of Moving Away”→

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I have no idea how you came across my blog. Maybe Blogging101, or a tag I wrote, a tweet, or a comment I left on your blog (please tell me, I’m curious).

If you follow me for a reason (my photography, book reviews, or maybe my reflections about my now monotonous life), you are probably “expecting” a specific type of blog posts, and for that I feel in a certain way guilty for not writing them. Continue reading “Dear Readers”→

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Today I want to talk to you about a situation I’ve been experiencing for a while. So stressful (even if that’s not the right adjective for it) that I’ve been having a persistent pain on my chest.

I’m a very sensible person. Things that people shake off easily or don’t even notice affect me all the time. The choice of the words and the subtle meanings, the quick – real – expressions people show after changing to others, little things that, as I said, nobody notices, and if I talk to somebody about them, I quickly am told that there are meaningless. That I’m seeing things that don’t exist.

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Today I attended to the probably most shocking lesson of my life: War photography.
From the beginning in the 19th century to the ’90s, every war documented by photographers and photos that made often literally history.
And here you may think: a lot of death bodies and desperation, that’s why it was shocking.
The answer is no.

I was browsing The Daily Post’s writing prompts’ page because I wanted to post something, and I stumbled upon the prompt “Opening Lines”: What’s the first line of the last song you listened to (on the radio, on your music player, or anywhere else)? Use it as the first sentence of your post.

The last song I listened to is ‘When You Know’ by Puggy and I listened to it for a very specific reason:

“Once I heard a famous Afro-American writer say that from the time she was a little girl she felt like a stranger in her family and her hometown. She added that nearly all writers have experienced that feeling, even if they have never left their native city. It’s a condition inherent in that profession, she suggested; without the anxiety of feeling different she wouldn’t have been driven to write. Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one’s own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists, many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings. This theory lifted a burden from my shoulders. I am not a monster; there are others like me.

I never fit in anywhere: not into my family, social class, or the religion fate bestowed on me. I didn’t belong to the neighbourhood gangs that rode their bikes in the street, my cousins didn’t include me in their games, I was the least popular girl in my school, and for a long time I was the last one to be invited to dance at parties – a torment, I like to think, due more to shyness than to looks. I clocked myself in my pride, pretending it didn’t matter to me, but I would have sold my soul to the devil to be part of a group had Satan presented me with such an attractive proposition. The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seem natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear, trait that frightened more than one potential suitor (I don’t want to give a false impression, there weren’t many). Later, during my years as a journalist, curiosity and boldness had their advantages. For the first time I was part of a community, I had absolute liberty to ask indiscreete questions and divulge myideas […].”